Osmund the Mason. His name was a mockery to him. Though like his father and grandfather, both occasional stoneworkers at Avonsford, he too bore the nickname of ‘Masoun’ or Mason, it meant nothing. He was only a humble serf, a labourer who was occasionally allowed to trim the stones for these cursed water channels, if he was lucky.
For the masons were the craftsmen who worked on the great cathedral. And that was another world. True, it was a world he sometimes dreamed of. When his day’s work was done, he would often walk into the magical quiet of the close and watch the craftsmen about their business in the huge building. He would see the solemn master masons, who ran the masons’ guild, the elect, who came from all over the country and even from across the Channel. But they, and the ordinary masons, had all been engaged long ago. Even their apprentices were usually from their own families. Why should they take notice of a young serf from Avonsford whose father had once worked in stone?
Yet the spirit of the carver was in his blood. One day, he vowed, he would find a way – he would work in the cathedral itself, amongst those masons in their heavy aprons who strutted so proudly to their work each day.
It was over a century since Godric Body had swung on the gallows on the castle hill; a few months afterwards his son had been born; and since the baby’s mother died in childbirth, it had seemed only natural to his uncle Nicholas to take the baby in and bring the boy up as his own. As a result, the children and grandchildren of Godric Body had usually been nicknamed Mason, like the rest of their adopted family, and when, eighty years after Godric’s death, one of his descendants had married his short, stocky cousin, the squat body, short thumbs and large head of the Mason clan had been passed to their son. Though typical of the busy Mason clan in his looks, however, the boy Osmund had a secret wildness of imagination, a feeling for natural forms, that derived directly from the unlucky young shepherd carver who had been hanged. It was a genius that the stolid-looking young serf, though he loved to carve, still only vaguely sensed.
At the moment, all that was offered him was drudgery, and he had to admit, he did not always work as hard as he should.
So as he gazed at the thin, greying priest he answered sadly:
“The sin of sloth.”
Canon Stephen nodded.
“Yes. You are slothful because you do not like the work. But God did not make you to be happy: he made you to serve, and only by serving him will you earn any heavenly reward.”
Osmund hung his large head. Though a part of him still rebelled, he knew that the canon, though harsh, was just. He turned to go.
“Stop.” The voice of the canon was relentless. “That is not all. You are hiding another sin, my son.”
How could he know? The youth felt the canon’s eyes on his back, and did not want to turn around.
“Well?”
Osmund still did not speak.
“Then I will tell you,” the cutting voice went on. “The sin is avarice.” He hissed the word.
So he knew.
He was paid a penny a day; he was poor.
“Men who should know better are tempting you to work for them, when you are needed here,” the canon accused. “Ungodly men.”
It was true, every word. And yet it had not seemed such a crime.
For this was what he had been waiting for so anxiously all morning. The men returning from their meeting had promised to offer him a penny and a half to work for them: an excellent wage, that might last a year until the work was completed. He knew them well. They had not seemed so ungodly. He turned round slowly, wondering how the canon had found out.
“You would desert your work here for money, Osmund. You are young. But the love of money is avarice, and that is a sin.” He paused, fixing the youth with his terrible gaze, then asked more kindly: “You cut stone well. They tell me you also carve wood.”
Osmund nodded. He had carved a fine door for Godefroi at the manor of Avonsford and he knew the priest had seen it. But the canon’s next words astonished him.
“Should you like to work at the cathedral?”
Osmund stared at Portehors, hardly daring to believe the question. To work in the cathedral with the masons – his dream? The priest regarded him shrewdly.
“They are paid a penny and a quarter a day,” he said quietly, “but not more.” He waited a moment before continuing. “You could start at Michaelmas, if you work well on the watercourses. Do you want to?”
“Oh yes,” his voice was almost pleading. He could not help it.
“Good.” The priest paused a moment. “Of course, if you work for Shockley and his friends, you will never work for the cathedral. Ever.”
Osmund paled, but did not speak.
Stephen Portehors watched him calmly; he was not a canon of the cathedral for nothing.
He had seen young Osmund’s work at Avonsford. He suspected the young fellow had talent.
It was at this moment that the Shockleys and Godefroi came riding down the street and the canon turned to face them.
The hair of the ferret-faced man who stood by the bridge, though it might once have been destined to shoot straight up from his head like a tuft of black grass, had – since it was rarely washed or brushed – relapsed instead into a dozen or so matted strands that stood in dispirited clumps like a small bush that had been charred. And in this tangled mess on his head, as it did on all things, the dust of New Salisbury had settled too.
William atte Brigge was about to experience the worst day of his life.
He was angry already. As he looked at the scene before him his small, close-set eyes were glittering with rage.
He had come with his small cart from Wilton that morning. He had crossed the Avon at Fisherton bridge and gone straight to the market place in the middle of the bishop’s new town. There he had left it with another trader from Wilton who had a stall, and made his way past the rising cathedral building to the southern tip of the new settlement, where the river curved round before turning south on its slow way to the coast.
To a casual observer, his behaviour now might have seemed strange.
In front of him was a new stone bridge. It crossed the river in two short leaps, between which lay a little island. On his left stood a cluster of buildings that was the hospital of St Nicholas; on the island stood the little chapel of St John, both of them built there by Bishop Bingham for travellers. It was a pleasant spot, the water murmuring soothingly as it passed on either side of the island.
William crossed to the centre of the bridge. First he glanced down the road on the other side that led to the south and west; then he looked back at the rising city; next he stared glumly at the little grey building on the island. And then, suddenly seized by some inner rage, he jumped up and down, flapping his thin arms, before turning and spitting viciously at the hospital. He spat once again, this time on the dusty road in front of him. Then he cried out: “Damn that bishop and all his works,” before turning and loping gloomily back towards the city.
William atte Brigge was a naturally resentful man – but today he had cause to be bitter: for the revered Bishop Bingham of Salisbury was about to ruin him.
Since the time of King Alfred and before, the town of Wilton had been the capital of the shire. Not only did the sheriff hold his court there, not only had there been a mint in the town since Saxon times, but above all it had been a thriving market, well situated at the junction of two busy rivers. True, there had been the little market in the old castle on Sarum hill. But because of the place’s exposed position and its lesser status it had never seriously damaged the business of the old Saxon town in the western valley. But a quarter of a century ago when Bishop Poore had started to build this new market town in the valley, the burgesses and traders of Wilton had begun to be anxious. Soon the bishop was granted the right to hold both an annual fair, and a market day each week; its charter also gave its freemen important trading concessions and tax exemptions similar to those granted to other great cities like Winchester, or Bristol. Worse, the royal hunting lodge in the forest of Clarendon was only two miles east of the bishop’s new town, and King Henry, who liked to hunt there, had a well known passion for new church building.
“The new town will soak up all the money,” the Wilton burgesses grumbled. “The king’s not interested in us.”
They were right. But at first there had been one compensating factor. For as the trade of the area grew and the traffic on its roads increased, many traders were coming to the new settlement from the south and west, and in order to cross the river system and enter the city, they had to use the bridge at Wilton. The Wilton traders therefore benefited from the traffic. For twenty years it had seemed that the old burgh in the west might even flourish beside its new neighbour. But now, in 1244, the inevitable had happened: Bishop Bingham had built his own bridge south of the cathedral. By crossing at Ayleswade, and paying a small toll, visiting merchants could get over this part of the river system without going near Wilton at all, and the older town was suddenly cut off from the mainstream of trade.
Nor was that all. Since time immemorial, the old burgh of Wilton had held two market days a week in its little square. The bishop had only been granted one. But the merchants in the broad expanse of New Salisbury’s market were trading without a licence almost every day of the week, and no one was stopping them. Despite the frequent protests to the king from the burgesses of Wilton, the new foundation was sucking its life blood away.
William’s family had made little progress since their aborted lawsuit a century before. Though he bore the same name as his great-grandfather who had so uselessly challenged the farmers from Shockley, William was not a tanner but a minor wool merchant, making a precarious living by advancing money to the smaller peasant farmers on the security of their wool, which he then sold in the open market. Since wool prices were firm and the trade booming, he managed to make small gains in this developing futures market. His wife and her sister had also inherited the tenancy of a cottage on one of the Godefroi estates; as a result of this, he owned thirty sheep which he grazed above the river Avon. To supplement the family’s modest income further, his sister-in-law wove a poor quality cloth on a single loom which he then sold for his own profit in the local markets at cut prices. In these ways he made a living; but he was poorer than his great-grandfather the tanner.
The family had never forgiven the prosperous farmers at Shockley.
“Those Shockley folk are thieves,” he told his children. It was an article of faith. And now the Shockleys had taken a house in the new town as well, the new town that was going to ruin Wilton.
“Curse them, and curse that bridge,” he muttered.
But if he was angry when he contemplated the bishop’s bridge, it was nothing compared to the fury he experienced when he reached the market place.
There were a dozen people standing by his cart; some were curious, a few openly grinning. The Wilton man in whose care he had left it was looking glum; and in the centre of the group, calm but severe, stood a figure he dreaded: Alan Le Portier, the aulnager. His daughter Alicia stood just behind him.
The aulnager was pointing at the cart. “Your cloth?”
The assize of aulnage had been instituted by King Richard half a century before. It was a simple tax on cloth, together with a set of standard measures that must be observed. Alan Le Portier had chosen a different variant of the family name, but like his brother Canon Portehors, he was a thin, exacting man: and when the great William Longspée had recommended him for the post of aulnager, that grand noble had assured the royal officials with a laugh:
“You needn’t worry, he’s just like all his family: he’ll count every fibre in the cloth if he has to.”
As he approached, William looked from the aulnager’s face to his daughter’s. Alan was a little greyer than his brother. His thin face was refined but stern and the eyes were dark. The daughter Alicia, a pleasant looking girl of sixteen with hazel eyes, was watching him curiously. She often went round the market with her father whom she admired, and she knew all its ways.
The aulnager repeated the question.
“Your cloth?”
He nodded.
“A quarter inch too narrow.”
Who could have guessed that he would notice? By short-changing his customers this tiny fraction on the width, he could make a modest profit even at his discounted prices. He should never have left the cart where the piercing eyes of Le Portier might find it.
“You’ll be fined of course,” the aulnager told him matter-of-factly. “Better take it back to Wilton. You can’t sell it here.”
William hung his head. It could have been worse: the aulnager could have impounded the merchandise; but it would still be hard to dispose of the cloth now. And it was two months’ work. Without a word he took the long handles of the cart and began dragging it away. As he went, he heard Le Portier remark to his daughter:
“You have to watch that family.”
He cursed them all, under his breath.